


The Quest of Jin-Nya

by Xaire



Series: Syl-No [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventure, Dark Fantasy, F/M, Fantasy, Gothic, Mages, Meta, Poetry, Quests
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:15:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26181775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xaire/pseuds/Xaire
Series: Syl-No [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1901317
Kudos: 2





	1. Prologue Part I — Reverie’s Home

In the industrial sector of Fent, Alabama, there was once a street called Reverie’s Home. As the United States wasn’t the sort of place to facilitate wealth or chastity, one would naturally expect to find that Reverie’s Home looked and felt nothing like what a home should be. A seemingly never ending serpent of fractured, sun-beaten asphalt, the street meandered between rows of generic, weed-wreathed condominiums, which were akin in both shape and color to gigantic cinder blocks set in a nigh unbroken chain across the hills. From every building broken windows yawned, exposing their ragged, glass teeth; their pale facades girdled in cracks and soiled with with streaks of water stains; and the foundation squatted amongst mats of dead grass. Despite it being the middle of Autumn, it was quite muggy, and so hot that mirages pranced across the road. Old street signs—warped and faded reminders of a time when a population requiring street signs existed—leaned alongside bare oaks and patchy pines like dejected strangers watching each other grow old. To the West, one could just barely make out the silhouettes of factory chimneys stabbing the amber horizon, but the toxic pillows the towers belched were large enough to be mistaken for natural clouds. As the day came to a close, the crimson sun hung low in the sky, taking one last, fiery look at the emaciated Reverie’s Home before surrendering to a moonless night. 

Already, the dormant crickets, the street’s chief inhabitants, were filling the dusk with their rhapsody, to the chagrin of no human neighbors. 

However, as the shadows of trees and buildings made their final stretch to their limit, Reverie’s Home became the home of one more soul, if only for the night. 

Her name was all but forgotten, just as much to herself as to anyone else she could ever call a friend. Memory, to the child who walked Reverie’s Home all on her own, had always been a frighteningly allusive thing. She had no recollection of her name, her parents’ names, their faces; she wasn’t even sure where she came from, beyond “across the ocean.” Her life had always been just a cloudy phantasm, beginning at some equivocal point approximately eight or nine years ago and attaining a pretense of clarity no less than three months before whatever the present day may be. Three months had always been the irrefutable duration of her evanescent memories, and she knew that because she had gotten into the habit of counting the days as they passed by. Whenever something especially interesting occurred she would make a small note on the back page of the hefty novel she carried on her being, along with the number corresponding to the day the event happened. The last entry in her account, which transpired on day ninety-four, consisted only of a single word: “Snake”. She could barely recall sitting on her haunches in the middle of an abandoned park by the Black Warrior River, watching a petite garden snake sway oh-so quietly across the pavement. The fading traces of a cool breeze born of gently parading water and the scarce rustling of grass as her legless friend sequestered himself in the foliage. The bliss was crippled, she remembered, when she reminded herself that, in just three months, when her count hits one hundred eighty four, those memories will fade and leave her with a confusing, one-word note in her prized book. Nights—or the few nights where she could find the convenience to sleep—were often hindered by spontaneously made-up daydreams, slotted right where her early life should have been. She never did this because she wanted to, but because she felt she had to, or else she would be left with stark emptiness, robbing her of the self awareness other people took for granted. She had no name. She had no story. Maybe that’s why whenever she happened to refer to herself in the third person, she would name herself for her nomadic lifestyle: the Vagrant. And maybe her lack of a history is why she obsessed over and indulged in stories. Maybe that’s why she fell in love with Syl-No. 

The Vagrant briskly thumbed through the yellowed pages of her one and only possession: a thick and battered hardcover wearing the title _Xindera’s Towers_. The cover was decorated with a bleary image of what at first glance appeared to be a slender spire, but was in fact a pillar of tarnished rubies surmounted by a similarly colored blossom of bloodied claws and scimitars. The back cover lacked a blurb, but was supplanted by a more austere painting depicting a violently contorted shadow cradling a little blonde girl in it’s sinuous arms, and upon the spine was etched the name of the author: D.L. Crawford. Between these two covers was engraved Syl-No, the only world she truly knew. Despite not being a concrete creation of God, the inexorably poignant, vociferously vanishing Syl-No was infinitely more palpable than the crumbling one-tracked life the Grand Architect burdened her with. Like anything in her existence, the circumstances surrounding her procuring of _Xindera’s Towers_ was a mystery, but quite unlike anything of weight it’s story was one the Vagrant had never forgotten and never will forget. The epic of Xindera and his failing quest was something that lingered and flourished at the apex of her consciousness, right where her nonexistent name would be. It wasn’t just the plot and the epithet of it’s antihero that adhered to her, it was every meticulous detail, each proudly amounting to an endless series of scenes and feelings every bit as bold as the world God failed with, if not more so. She read through the book only once, but since then she needed only to close and eyes and she was standing beneath the trio of cold suns crowning Syl-No’s pink skies, standing amongst deeply bowed sequoia trees the color of rust and a pastoral field of snarling flowers that smelled of dying embers. Syl-No wasn’t always a beautiful place—in fact, most of the time it was quite disheartening in it’s atmosphere—but it was far more real than Earth. There was but a relative handful of images in her head older than three months, let alone three years, but all of them were scenes woven in the image of Syl-No. Often times, always to a depressing but strangely wholesome effect, she would superimpose the characteristics of her imaginary microcosm over God’s meaningless macrocosm, picturing such things like the meandering roads on which she ventured as the island-spanning geoglyphs of Mazzra. Days like these, the buildings were the reposing faces of half-buried sleeping titans, the noxious smokestacks of steel plants were the lightning-bearing sentinels overlooking the hives of Tharisse, and the vast wisps of clouds were the wings of lolling sky lilies. 

But as always, the reverie had to end. Too often the Vagrant would plunge back to the real world and thereafter stare long and hard at the tear stained cover of _Xindera’s Towers_ , hopelessly wondering why she had to be born a child in God’s green Earth and not a Nohk in Crawford’s scarlet Syl-No. 

She suddenly stopped at the intersection of her street and another, noting a garland of traffic lights wreathing the cracked blacktop. In blatant defiance of the utter lack of traffic, the lights still shone with a rather unexpected vibrancy. At length she watched green give way to yellow, then to red and back to green over the course of hell knows how many minutes. Idly, she pretended the three-shaded devices were the festival lanterns of the Beehmies, but the illusion cracked every time the light changed. Proceeding on she came across the obligatory street sign denoting the two roads. One being her temporary home, Reverie’s Home, and the other being Fuchsia Parkway. She bitterly mused over the the irony in calling a street “Reverie’s Home” when it couldn’t host any escapist reverie. Fortunately, the Vagrant thought, the sun was dissolving into a dimming haze of crimson across the Western skyline, so perhaps the coming darkness would spur her imagination. 

Her attention strayed across the street, where a squat edifice—very much identical to all the others reposing across the hills—brooded behind an empty parking lot, which, judging by the tufts of weeds and grass inching out of it’s copious fractures, was well on it’s way to becoming more of a yard. The building itself was in no better condition, but unlike the others it still sported it’s old designation, stamped in faded black paint along the Westward facade: AUnit Z20. What was peculiar about this one building, however, was the cross of police tape stretched across the exterior stair well. For the Vagrant, experience was virtually nonexistent, but the impressions they left on her have always remained both palpable and reachable, enough to rival Syl-No. She approached and she saw the yellow strips of plastic set before her, and she immediately felt threatened, somehow associating the bold printed “POLICE LINE — DO NOT CROSS” with predacity. Logic, the sort of logic spoken of by state issued domestic enchiridions, told her the police were a force for good and that she was in no danger lest she were brazen enough to disobey the “DO NOT CROSS” signs, but instinct, the sort of instinct rooted in voided memories, said otherwise. She knew her that cops were predators. Just like the Hithers prowling through the nurseries of Flyscolinohk, they live only to feed, fuck, and dominate, and all other souls only exist as means to those ends. In the Vagrant’s conviction, the alleged protectors of the U.S. would have swiftly and callously seized her and delivered her to God-knows-where. For the moment her daydreaming was haunted by a vision of a men in blue, gold badge and black gun brandished, standing twice as tall as herself, unreadable expressions covering their modified faces as they clamped the Vagrant’s delicate arms in cold, white hands. She imagined the friction of bitter metal clamped around her wrists, the stagnant musk in the back of a patrol car, and the sickening sensation of not knowing whether or not she’ll live to see tomorrow’s sunrise or, worse yet, if she’ll live for two more decades as a thing of perverted amusement, living in the dark closet of an Executive. She’ll never know what experiences seeded these visions in her head, but no matter what these fears were real and potent, which was more than she could say for the remainder of her psychological spectrum. 

She was, however, very hungry. A box of raisins swiped from a connivence store was her last meal, and that was three days ago. Needless to say she feared starvation, as any would, but fearing starvation more than she feared the authorities was a complex that only made sense in a famished mind. The absence of paddy wagons, helicopters, and the ominous rattling of military grade weapons opened the possibility that she could forage through the abandoned Z20 without calling upon the policeman’s wrath while the brittle ribs showing through her taut skin undermined what was left of her circumspection. 

She mulled at length—long enough to watch the sun die Westward—and only managed circle back to her initial purpose. Ultimately, the decision was as no brainer. With the singing of cicadas and owls bringing life to a world behind her, the Vagrant approached Z20 with the gospel of Syl-No cradled in her arms.


	2. Prologue Part II—Z20

Z20 was bereft of human life, chocked with dust and oppressively quiet, but that didn’t mean the place was hollow. Everywhere the Vagrant walked, the environment seemed to hum with a subtle melancholy, as if the building itself knew it must live it’s final moments scorned and forlorn. Shadows swelling in the most sunless corners stared back at her in envy of her mobility and the abused concrete floor pleaded curtly under the weight of her feet. The outside corridors were unwelcoming, walls closing all around her lonesome self while the ceiling fell so low that the Vagrant had to wonder how adults could stride upright here without dragging their crowns. Light fixtures, pipes, and air conditioners were all inert as the organs of any dead shell and stairs promised no safe sanctuary despite leading heavenward. Doors—the many, many uniformed, numbly numbered doors, lined up like prisoners waiting on death row—seemed no friendlier. Feeling unduly unscrupulous, she braved an attempt at a doorknob—married to a door branded with the number 14—her little fingers seizing and forcing it either which way, but she was as powerless to open the threshold as she was to move the sky. She stood gazing at the faded “14”, her ears awaiting the baleful reproach of an adult beyond, but to her grim relief was only given the quick and inadvertent grinding of a pebble beneath her toe and the ethereal rustling of pine trees, fidgeting in a breeze some distance away. She imagined the sound as a Faereni Wind Serpent politely reminding the Vagrant that she was alone and safe. She could sense the stale space where tenants once dwelled sitting heavy just behind the door, and she loudly agreed with her imaginary patron “No one’s home.”

She ventured further on, passing doors 15 and 16, 17 and 18, her raspy footprints wearily singing along to her counting. She obliviously continued up a stair well, and the tune of her marching escalated into an echoing wail in the lofty space until it fell silent upon the next floor. She was sardonically greeted with a crooked sign boldly declaring the location to be “LEVEL 3Z”, reminding her that officials of the past apparently considered ordinary people incapable of basic tallying. LEVEL 3Z was an underwhelming copy of the previous floor, so much so that she was able to continue up to 4Z without feeling the guilt of leaving 3Z unexplored. 

Likewise, 4Z was another humdrum tube of concrete and doors, but this one possessed the amenity of a small balcony bulging out of the halls open end. The Vagrant groped in the darkness of another harmonious Alabama night, grasping the rail with her paws and stretched her chin atop the itchy, tarnished metal, wincing but not retreating as flakes of rust stabbed at her skin. She was short, even for her age, but she never considered that trait a handicap. At only forty-five inches tall, the Vagrant liked to think she had the honor of seeing the world through a unique angle, which gave everyday items—such as a mundane handrail—the appearance of grandeur. 

Though the moon could not be bothered to appear this night, there was nonetheless a subdued lambency painted around the army of shadows crowding Reverie’s Home and it’s dejected monuments. Trees and grass, shattered fences and eternally paralyzed trucks, all were indiscriminately washed in a color that reflected the nocturnal sky, just a few umbras lighter than black, but it was enough to assure the Vagrant that the world still stood and will most likely continue to stand when the sun damns Reverie’s Home to another blistering Autumn morning. For now, there were only stars. The Vagrant was always under the bizarre impression those stars were moving, albeit in an imperceptibly slow pace like cosmically vast fireflies whose glass wings beat but once every millennia. No one has ever told her what stars really were, so she often filled that glaring hole in her worldly knowledge with other wild speculations. 

She was surprised to have received a visitor, tiptoeing along the rail, cautiously waddling towards her fingers on four tiny legs, thorned claws hugging it’s chest. She squinted at the oncoming beast, pulled it’s lanky silhouette out of the darkness and smiled a crooked-toothed smile upon learning it was a praying mantis, one of the few of God’s creature’s that would not have looked out of place in Syl-No. 

“Hi!” The Vagrant cooed, laying a temple upon the railing to better meet the regal insect’s leer. The mantis advanced closer to her emerald eyes and halted just a hair’s width away from her lashes. The girl didn’t flinch, not even when her little companion slowly stretched it’s wicked arms out to it’s side and pulled them back in just as gradually. The mantis twisted it’s head in mockery of a haughty look, and she could have sworn it’s mandibles opened into something of a smile. 

“What’s your name?” She asked it. The mantis remained eerily still, but it’s reflective eyes betrayed a knowing gleam, as if it understood but was helpless to communicate. It leaned forward ever so slightly and the Vagrant could feel her heart precipitate as she pretended the mantis was about to utter a divine secret. She feigned disappointment when the mantis withheld it’s wisdom. “Leonardo.” She whispered. It was one of the few earthly names that still swam in her mind, yet there was no context, no meaningful individual who once bore the moniker, and no clear reason for it to be within her memories. But she had always associated the romantic name to prudence, patience, sensitivity, creativity, and, most importantly, solitude. Once there must have been a very smart person named Leonardo, the Vagrant reasoned, who was so smart that men and woman were unable to understand him and therefore, never dared to be his friend. In a fit of vanity, she could have likened herself to the made-up soul that was Leonardo, and now she had met a similarly kindred spirit. “I’m going to call you Leonardo.” She gaily told the mysterious insect. 

The Vagrant withdrew _Xindera’s Towers_ and pried open the back cover, letting her jumbled bounty of one-word journal entries scintillate in the night’s strange un-light. While her fingers blindly patted around in her hand warmer for the pen she kept on her being, her eyes strained to discern the old scribbles swamping page 566 of her beloved novel. “Cup, 12”, “Robot, 30”, “Mask, 46” and “Casket, 49” were just a few of her memos, but as always they were meaningless proclamations of experiences that never happened. She could feel her eyes start growing thick and hot with tears as she set her pen to paper, knowing that the marvel of “Mantis, 96” would die in just three months…

But then the Vagrant had an idea.

She pressed Xindera’s Towers to her chest with one arm and clamped a few fingernails between her teeth as she turned to find Leonardo still standing high and mighty against the crisp, starry sky. 

“Le-Le-Leonardo?” She stuttered. Butterflies took flight inside her stomach as she had the distressing but amusing feeling she was asking someone out on a date. “Would like…would you like to go…t-to come with me? Be my friend?” 

Leonardo’s head pivoted towards her with a cruel, robotic grace that, ironically, only made him seem more magical. His wings fanned out and for one horrifying second the Vagrant thought the mantis was preparing to soar off into the sky, forever abandoning her, but then his wings rested upon gaunt body once more. One of Leonardo’s antennae twitched in such a way to convince the child the insect had consciously winked, inviting her to set her opened hand before him.

Leonardo did not hesitate to stride into her palm. The Vagrant released a cherubic giggle, imagining the many adventures she and Leonardo would have together.

With her new friend balanced on her arm, she slowly scaled floors five and six, the considerate pace opening her senses to the slight drop in gravity that developed as she ascended closer to the barrier between Earth and space. Leonardo, a being blessed with flight, was no doubt apathetic to a mere difference of a hundred or so feet, but the Vagrant could practically feel the world turning beneath her feet and was unsure wether to consider the experience bedeviling or magnificent. Her climb put her in the mind of Chapter 21 of _Xindera’s Towers_ , in which the eponymous hero inscribed a poignant ode to his daughter upon the final brick of the Fourth Tower. The brick, of course, was ensconced in the topmost balcony of the tower, exactly one hundred and twenty-three levels above Syl-No, which was meant to be read only by the daughter upon her father’s passing. It was a unique kind of treasure—gold for a weary climber—that would have only meant anything to a single person. The Vagrant wondered if, when she set a sore foot upon Z20’s seventh floor, she too would be given something memorable. But of course, Leonardo was sufficient enough. After all, who could ask for anything more than such a mystical friend to share a story with? Yet, the Vagrant’s childish greed guided her onward and would not have released her until she until she found the treasure atop the tower. It could have been food, something a famished wanderer like her had a dire need for, but what she really discovered offset her hunger for another few hours and turned her life around into a path that only God himself could have ever foreseen. 

On floor 7Z, there was a door. There were many doors, really, but those were just insipid impersonators to the one that gave the child pause; the one that became the center of her entire universe, if only for a moment. 

Door 35, door 36, door 37, door 38, door 39, and door 40 were all locked tight like the mouths of wise offenders on trial, but door 41 stood out amongst the others not just because it was open but because it lied in pieces, strewn across the yawning threshold between the abandoned apartment and the corridor where the Vagrant stood and ogled. She needn’t wonder who or what could have brutishly reduced an innocent gate to splinters because she found another strip of dreaded police tape bridging the two pulverized sides of the door’s stripped frame. She feared for the well being of whomever called 41 their home, but was acutely aware that—wherever they may be—this ill-fated soul was better off dead. They were taken, and are in the hands of the state, under the condemning eye of God. They no longer existed and it sent a sickening, guilty surge down the Vagrant’s throat, gut, and bladder to spurn a moment of silence for their sake. After all, she thought she didn’t know the dead tenant. That is, until she read the name printed on the address tag obliquely adhered above the doorbell. 

David L. Crawford. 

Though, in the act, she deemed it unnecessary, the Vagrant held up _Xindera’s Towers_ with it’s three-inch wide spine facing her, comparing the name engraved thereon to the epitaph assigned to the empty tomb of 41. There she held the book for several seconds, carefully eyeing each letter to assure her sporadically dyslexic mind wasn’t playing tricks on her. When she dismissed the improbable notion of Crawford and Crawford sharing the exact initials, she choked out a sullen sound, not unlike a dying kittens last cry, realizing too suddenly that she had strode into Syl-No’s birthplace, but it’s silent father had been mercilessly ripped away from the mortal coil by Earth’s own god long before she was ever afforded the chance meet him. 

“Why?” The Vagrant grieved, squeezing Crawford’s story to her heart. The ever furtive Leonardo had snuck his way up the Vagrant’s arm and was currently perched upon her shoulder, getting cozy in the vines of her greasy black hair. While he was so close to her ear, she could barely make out the soft rasping of his claws coming together. True to his species’ name, it sound like the doleful prayer of a priest looming over a grave. _Why indeed?_ The mantis might have said. She riffled through her volume, the sharp fluttering and windy exhaling of paper setting the mood for a word by word mental replay of Xindera’s tale, a tale so sodden in perverted imagery, nihilistic lessons, and destructive truths that surely the prosaic would find it worth sending to the fire. This wasn’t the first time the disconsolate nature of Crawford’s words stood bare for her to see—it was clear from the start Syl-No was a beautiful Hell, and she found this welcoming—but this was the start of a line of thought she never ventured on before: was D.L. Crawford really anything like his opus? Was he a beautiful beast living in a heinous hell, akin to the Faceless Liar? Could this man the Vagrant never met but always idolized truly be the sort of person that’s better off dead, if only for the the betterment of society? She had to know.

The Vagrant’s left foot crossed the threshold, but the rest of her did not follow. She drew back in hesitation, gazing deep into the dusky silhouettes of walls and furniture as if they were the guts of a concentration camp. She had to remind herself the police weren’t here to witness this burglary, but that did little to assuage guilty lump blocking her throat. She had always been under the impression that, in some literal way, her existence alone was a direct affront to the law, so if merely showing her pale face to a man with a badge was enough to end her life, what difference did it make to break just one more rule? Why must she hesitate? She wouldn’t begin to understand her feelings until her exploring of 41 began in earnest. Upon admitting herself, she was met with the pregnant darkness truly becoming of a place lacking windows, so her first act was to turn on the lights. She found a cluster of light switches, flipped the first, then the second, third, forth, and snorted in frustration as she made quick work of the final six switches. Not a single device moved nor did a single bulb explode with light. 

“Power’s off.” The Vagrant loudly observed, hoping against hope something, living or dead, human or otherwise, would respond. In any case, she was largely unbothered by the darkness. Being adept at seeing through shadows, she was confident in her ability to find what she needed, but this was hallowed ground, the full appreciation of which merited the benefit of light. In short order she found a wireless lamp half drowned in a pile of battered composition notebooks. She gave the motion sensor a wave and the lamp returned her kindness with a flood of feeble grey light. The result wasn’t entirely what she had wanted, but it banished the darkness, if to a limited degree. But for every pallid highlight there was a shadow that seemed to sway to the tune of a candle that didn’t exist. If anything, this drowsy glow, akin to moonlight, made her believe this to be midnight visitation to an abandoned cathedral. The living room was a small place, but the peculiar dimensions and the careful arrangement of the furniture turned it into an altar. The lone sofa and the volumes dressings it’s cushions resembled a pew and it’s book of hymns, whilst the dormant water heater supporting the roof were dead ringers for soaring pillars guarding an ongoing alley. But in spite of the solitude and the pervasive musk of a haunt long forsaken, the Vagrant still didn’t feel safe. Every single mark that betokened human life—the imprint of buttocks on a cushion, the strokes of fingerprints on stainless steel, the fraying on the carpet where bare feet relentlessly stomped—consolidated to animate Crawford’s ghost as to infect the young girl’s mind with the images of the faceless author going about his daily routines. She saw him sit, cross his legs, thumb the dials of a long outdated XM radio, and scribble away in the half-light on a cheap but reliable sketchbook. 

The odd part of weaving this involuntary vision was imagining the soundtrack Crawford theoretically chose to kindle his creativity because it reminded the Vagrant she had no recollection of ever listening to music. She understood the concept of music better than most, yet nowhere in her famished mind did even the vaguest tune ring or sing. With a sour taste in her mouth, she reflected how she had not been graced with a song in over three months, so she resolved to change that. 

To her fortune, the XM radio was wireless and at just over thirty percent charged. 

“Whash…what should I l-listen, Leo…what should I listen to…Leonardo?” She shamelessly stuttered as she let the mantis climb down her sleeve and onto a nearby bookshelf. Leonardo strode past a family of volumes all belonging to _The Principles of Human Flaws_ series, which he seemed to take a detached interest in before continuing on to a bookend sculpted in the likeness of a nude woman weeping over an aborted infant. “Happy? Something happy?” the Vagrant derived from the insects stilted movements without need for justification or response. 

She played with the buttons for several seconds until the seemingly never ending droning of vacant radio stations ceased and an computerized, genderless voice hummed out of the dust-congested speakers “…the aftermath of the April 2065 council bombings, General Thaddeus White issued a national injunction to all colonial law enforcement agencies to…”. Once it became apparent there was no music to be heard here she promptly changed the channel. She repeatedly jabbed the scratched touchscreen, watching the station numbers climb into the two-hundreds. Her frustration mounted as she was given nothing but slight variations of headache-inducing white noise. Finally she looped back around to station 6, and groaned when she learned it was the same soulless parody of a historian she tried to escape. Her mood lightened when she considered that the robot—however coldly—was nonetheless telling a story, even if it was only a recounting of historical events. However, there was a sickening quality to the robot’s feigning of nationalism that crawled beneath the Vagrant’s skin. It was the kind of feeling that convinced her she had tuned into something more corruptive than midnight pornography, and as the monotoned voice continued to echo unrestrained through the entire apartment, she began to understand why. Regardless, she was content with letting the it narrate, just to banish the silence.

“…months later, Herbert Vernon of the DCA proposed a bill to strike California with a Class Z nuclear weapon. That same day, the council—now headed by Executive Shelby Wane—gave their absolute consent with an astounding forty-to-zero vote. No quarter was given to the separatists, but a warning was broadcast across all Californian frequencies and the Civil Disciplinary Force was deployed around the state’s borders and shores to assure that no one—be they a traitor or loyalist—escaped their penalty. As the missile detonated, the Master had all domestic televisions feed-locked to any one of the hundreds of cameras watching the angelic fires cleanse California’s land of the faithless rebels. Once our wise and gracious leader confirmed that every American citizen was witnessing the annihilation of the traitors, they publicly announced ‘The gavel will come down again if so provoked.’”

Carrying the lamp as a makeshift flashlight, the Vagrant glided into the kitchen, sending families of cockroaches scattering and retreating beneath the refrigerator and dining table as she intently waved the the ashen searchlight from one cobwebbed corner to another. It was no hassle discovering the pantry, but upon opening it she was disheartened to find nothing more than an opened box of FDA branded wafers, a lone bottle of peroxide, and a bag of apples which had long since melted into a foul, hairy sludge slowly diffusing into the wooden shelves.

“…’rations were scarce’. Objected Councilman Andrews. It was with little more deliberation between the two parties that the Hannibal Act was put into action, which, as many may already know, demanded that human commodities be culled from low income colonies and physically processed for the benefit of the Aristocratic classes. Few objected and made the abhorrent accusation that the Master was, quote, ‘literally eating the poor folks’. Rest assured, these dishonest extremists were eliminated at once.” 

She didn’t need to check to know that the contents of the powerless refrigerator fared no better than the contents of the pantry, so seeing no other option she snatched up the box and was surprised to find an unopened bag of crushed but entirely unspoiled wafers crammed in the very bottom, along with a handful of roaches who had died in a valiant attempt to reach the flavorless gold beneath the plastic. Greed and hunger suddenly superseded every human thought in her mind as she removed and unceremoniously tore open the bag with the ardor of a feeding lion. By the time she felt moderately nourished, she had cleaned bag of almost every crumb, leaving only a modest sprinkling of dust and a few crisp flakes. Though barely amounting to a taste to a titan such as herself, the Vagrant surmised the leftovers to be a feast to little Leonardo likingZ She dumped the bag’s loot into the pit of her upturned palm and rushed back to the living room where, after a short but worried search, she found that the mantis had conquered the chasm between the shelf and the sofa during her time in the kitchen and was currently marching across the silky fabric of a lofty, decadently coral throw pillow. Her giggles eclipse the funereal narrator as she experienced true mirth from watching her royal friend explore this new world. 

“In the October of 2081, the final block was set within the wall enclosing the East Coast, thus completing the protective barrier between the United States and the rest of the world. Since that day, not a single foreigner has set foot on our soil nor has a single American eluded their motherland.”

She offered her bread-baring hand to Leonardo and, just as forthwith as before, the mantis climbed into her palm but the Vagrant was dismayed to learn that he had no interest in her gift. 

“Not hungry?” The Vagrant cooed as she ever so gently brushed the tip of her finger along Leonardo’s sepia back. His ethereal eyes swiveled mechanically towards hers and his mandibles shifted in an almost unreadable pretense of a smile. It was only after the Vagrant considered the possibility that mantises don’t eat crumbs that Leonardo’s expression became something of scorn. “I’m sorry, friend.” She immediately said, lifting the mantis closer to her upset eyes. “I’m, er, I-I’ll bring you a…s-something better. Better to, uh, eat. Soon. Okay? I promise.” 

Leonardo held his disdainful glare against the Vagrant’s soft pout for a few seconds too long, as if taking the time to appreciate her submission. After that he stalked up her sleeve, stopping and standing high once he was back on her shoulder. 

“Are you mad?” The Vagrant’s asked, feeling sorry. Leonardo had no response to offer. The finality of his demeanor snuffed any chance of carrying on with this topic but the Vagrant was at ease with that, despite herself. In the midst of silence she was free to scavenge the treasure at the top of Crawford’s tower. 

“…the second and final instance of U.S. armed forces venturing outside of our borders. Cuba had been left in shambles in the wake of hurricane Odette, and as such their military power had been crippled and their economy all but destroyed. The prime minister at the time, Abigail Gustafson, was well aware that she and her sovereignty stood no chance against our ambassadors and signed the 2086 treaty of Havana without impedance, forfeiting eighty percent of Cuba’s resources to the Master.” 

The apartment was very small, as she discovered. Once the light and buzz of the living room was at her back, the Vagrant was hemmed to little more than a square-shaped juncture, surrounded by three closed doors and an open egress scourged by the droning of the radio robot. And yet, the vastness of the living room carried over into the dark hallway in a way that brazenly ignored the three dimensional walls erected by enslaved men many years ago. Adept at making her way through almost any night, the contours of the juncture and it’s three doors were not lost to her sights, but nonetheless there were shadows too deep even for her keen eyes to penetrate. Wedged in the corners of the moldy walls and smeared across the ceiling were wells of darkness that ruptured the confined space of 41 and opened the way to vast and tenebrous voids, the solidity of which made the slowing dying county outside feel like a receding dream. 

A rhythmic tickling at the nape of the Vagrant’s neck implied Leonardo’s crossing from one shoulder to the other. If she hadn’t known any better she would have mistaken the touch for phantom fingers urging her onward. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the apartment’s resident ghost was steadily losing patience with her. It was too easy to imagine every creaking floorboard or popping rafter as a protest against her presence, but if there’s anything the Indhem Inepts that infirmly guard the Innerplain Church has taught her it’s that empty omens often preceded material gain. The treasure—whatever it may be—would be guarded by nothing more than her own trepidation, endlessly spouting baseless warnings. She ignored her own worries just as she ignored the idle sounds coming out of the old building. 

A stale, metallic whiff floated amid the dust in the air, a faint yet tangible lure in a world shaped in nothing but hazy outlines. She concentrated on the scent, casually wondering if Leonardo had caught it too. Within seconds it waxed familiar. It was the odor of a deep cut, of peeled skin, exposed and glistening red flesh. The scent of blood, which she knew too well, although this was the first time she had ever detected any one else’s blood. The question on her mind was “Who does it belong to?” 

“…institution deliberated at length on the best method to administer the sedative into the public gene pool, until the November of 2084 when it was decided that mass blood transfusion was the most optimal choice. An estimated seventy-six thousand Americans had received the sedative within the first three days of the program, following which was a startling eighty percent drop in crime across the nation. By the beginning of 2085, all American citizens were under the Master’s control.”

An uncontrollable intuition nudged the Vagrant’s toward the rightmost door where, she reasoned, the bloody aroma originated and without hesitating, she gingerly eased it open, savoring yet fearing the sound of wailing hinges. Beyond was yet more darkness, with a charcoaled semicircle of an opened window cut out of an otherwise perfect oblivion. Without a pane of glass to impede the outside flavors from entering, she could hear the chorus of leaves frolicking in the midnight wind and the unhindered stars shone like embers in the cold remains of a fire. A draft waltzed in, bringing with it a nip of cool Autumn air that had become so scarce in recent years, which toyed with leaves of paper, the existence of which was betrayed only by a limp snapping that fluttered somewhere out of the pitch. In spite of the lulling atmosphere, the Vagrant was suddenly sprinting back into the living room under some impulse she never saw coming, and for one dreadful moment she worried that her sense of adventure had been undermined by a childish fear of the dark. It wasn’t until she snagged the still-glowing lamp and backtracked to the apartments abysmal niches that she was reassured her bravery and her chance to seize Z20’s treasure was unbroken. 

Back at the malodorous room, she waved the nimbus of light around until she could stitch together a vivid image of the rooms true contours. It was an office, ubiquitously glazed in a thick layer of dust. To her left there was a metal cabinet, with one drawer hanging open like a dead man’s jaw and a portable television laying prone on top. To the right was a bookshelf which, to the Vagrant’s disappointment, was utterly bereft of any article or relic, save for a score of insipid dust bunnies. Before her, spread beneath the window, was an equally vacant desk and chair, wood and leather alike stained with mold, a natural consequence of staring directly through an open window for so long. 

“…NASA terminated. It was then announced that the assortment of ‘exoplanets’ the defunct branch claimed to have discovered was, in fact, a hoax intended on diluting the populace. We are not to be concerned with what lies beyond the Earth’s microcosm, but rather the Earth is to be the concern of the unknowable macrocosm. God is real and God is watching.” 

“God is real. God is watching.” The Vagrant echoed as she crawled into the lofty chair, shivering as the felt the cold and ichorous residue dampening the seat of her jeans. That aside, the chair was quite comfortable. She set the lamp down on the desk, bringing to light all of the cuts and scratches tattooed on it’s rustic surface, and allowed Leonardo to disembark. She slouched and watched the mantis stalk after his own elongated shadow until he found the frail body of a small moth laid to rest just within the light’s reach. It’s outstretched and crumpled wings were so deeply grey that it turned the surrounding desk from an antique piece of furniture to a forlorn wasteland that existed solely to sepulcher the lifeless insect. Leonardo, the only drop of life on the desk’s little environment, motionlessly brooded over the moth for as as long the Vagrant cared to watch, which was say at least twenty minutes. The girl could never have imagined what was passing through Leonardo’s grain-sized brain as he peered deep into it’s late kindred’s eyes. 

“God is r-real. God’s watching.” The Vagrant repeated, gradually swiveling her seat around in a full circle. It was a catchy phrase, she had to admit, but only because the words felt hilariously unsubstantial in more ways that she could identify, almost like saying “Night is evil, day is peaceful.” There was as much philosophical and theological flexibility in that one saying as there was warmth: none at all. If God was real and alive, the Vagrant felt he must be this universe’s most corrosive disease. She need only smell the blood in the air and listen to the dehumanizing rhetoric of the radio to know that. But she wasn’t a child of God, so why care? 

“The Master is God’s eyes, ears, and mouth. He is God’s proxy. It is in the best interest of the American people to always remember that.”

She snatched up the lamp, hugging it between her chest and her curled knees and did what any kid would do in a swivel chair. Using the edge of the desk for leverage, the Vagrant slung herself into a whirl, giggling aloud while the world rushed around her, the dull light skipping across the colorless furniture and coming back again and again. The ride lasted for several satisfying seconds before the chair squealed to a halt and the dizzy Vagrant savored the sublime sensation of her head readjusting to normal gravity. She used the opportunity to check on Leonardo, and found the mantis regarding her with a disapproving look, to which she responded by impishly sticking out her tongue. The Vagrant indulged in another bout of laughter, which shortly mutated into a horrific coughing fit. 

“My throat’s dry.” She assured herself, fearing the worst. She made a mental note to sooth her ailment with some tap water on the way out. 

Leonardo’s antennae twitched in suggestion of a sigh as the insect strode indifferently over the moth towards a destination bound to be of significance only to him. 

“…it was only last year that the latest species was official added to the Purging Order. The lunar moth—a pest that was once as verdant as it was useless—was exterminated by the ECA…” 

“Again!” The Vagrant cheered, and she launched into another wild spin. She gleefully let her bodily equilibrium be thrown into disarray once more and threw her hands and legs into the wind, but that was an expression that quickly proved unwise as she accidentally let the lamp fly free from her lap in a twisting flurry of light. There’s was a thunderous noise as the devise hammered the wall and, suddenly, absolute void. The impact must have cut the lamp’s light, and she hoped it wasn’t for good.

“Oh no!” the Vagrant cried, leaping out of the chair and blindly landing belly-first on the side of the desk. Her first instinct was to make sure Leonardo was unharmed, but that would have to wait until visibility could be restored. She collapsed to her hands and knees and searchingly roved her palms across the itchy carpet, seeing nothing but feeling every mote of dust and knife-like pencil shaving coalesce under her nails. So far fruitless, she was eventually guided to the tight space under the desk, through which her shoulders just barely allowed her access. Her fingers probed until they scraped the paint from the wall backing the desk, and she would have backed out had her desperation not pushed her to continue searching the narrow niches between the wall and the piece of furniture. It was then she came in contact with something familiar and had to wonder if she must have somehow forgotten _Xindera’s Towers_ in this odd hiding spot, but the weight of her prized volume dangling in her jacket told her otherwise. The razored edges of fresh paper and the damp, textured cloth of a spine fitted neatly into the dip of her palm as she wrapped her paw around a book. A new book, in fact, not just to herself but to the entire world. A hidden treasure—judging by the thickness, weighing just less than four-hundred pages—that had been so recently published that it’s birth had to coincide with Crawford’s arrest. 

So what was this story titled? The Vagrant had to know! 

She rose so impulsively that the top of her head slammed into the desks underside. Her pained groans matched the rattling of loose wood and bolts as she crawled backwards, feeling like a moron. Out in the open, she instantly flopped the book into the negligible glow of the open window, and her heart started beating eagerly when the sound of stacked paper on wood echoed throughout the apartment. 

“…second Alexandria. Forty-two million books destroyed…” 

Her mood dimmed briefly when her continued search for the lamp seemed futile but brightened without warning when it was discovered laying prone on the far side of the room. She passed a finger over the tiny glass eye of the motion sensor and the room was brightly awash in color once more, allowing the Vagrant to breath a sigh of relief. 

“…criminalized. The denizens of Long Island were incarcerated without quarter and the press shut down…” 

With the lamp back in it’s rightful place, both Leonardo—clinging koala-style to the lip of the desk—and the hitherto nameless volume were laid bare before her passionate rubbernecking. The volume was thick, as she deduced earlier, it’s alabaster pages so finely stacked as to deceive the eye into believing it beheld a single white box clamped between two rugged carmine covers. The back, much like _Xindera’s Towers_ , was void of any print, but equally lacked any image to hint at the untold comedy or tragedy within. The spine too held no clues save for a narrow design that ran the length, which resembled a kind of spear or scepter capped with delicate, arabesque designs. Curious, but hardly enlightening. 

The book’s forward-most face, on the other hand, was illuminating enough that it made up for the book’s otherwise chaste veneer. The first thing that caught the child’s eye was the familiar signature that, had she found it on any other day and in any other place, would have struck her with sheer excitement. But within the short time the Vagrant spent in the man’s desolate home, the name “D.L. Crawford”, engraved in a small, spidery script just above the book’s lowest edge, had aged into a heavy, cimmerian relic that left her grappling with a range of nigh irreconcilable emotions. Above that was a pair of opalescent wings, the pressed contours of which were drawn so elaborately that the Vagrant couldn’t determine if they were membranous, as of a demon’s, or feathery, as of an angel’s. 

And above that, cut into the novel’s stoic form with one black stroke, was the volume’s title…

 _The Quest of Jin-Nya_.

“…the monuments were demolished without ceremony. Gone were the days of heretics befouling the minds of the American people. Gone were Verne and Lovecraft, Wilde and Tolkien, Poe and Dickens, Homer and Shakespeare…”

And she locked up. Her blood froze, breath stalled, mind numbed, she couldn’t move, couldn’t feel, couldn’t speak. Like a baby sharply changing it’s mood from neutral to despair upon it’s moment of birth, the Vagrant became—for lack of a more accurate word—afraid. She had no idea why, but even disregarding the author’s status as a slaughtered malcontent her prize seemed a baleful omen of something that could be heard but not understood. She told herself it was only a book. A poignant book, but a book nonetheless. All common sense dictated that, when given literature, it was to be split apart and imbibed. She did so once and it became her entire world, now she was on the cusp of another existence. 

Or perhaps, she considered, another testament in the bible of Syl-No. Another fall into the ambers and embers of a world wasting away beneath dead gods; another calamity to betide creatures more woefully human than the shells that haunted Earth; another woven memory to define the lonely, transient thing that was the Vagrant. 

Yes! This was the work of David Crawford, and therefore a Sylnan story! It had to be! She gazed down upon the book now clutched tightly in her small fingers, feeling it’s weight like an anchor bridging her to the realm she truly lived for. Breaking her paralysis she ripped _The Quest of Jin-Nya_ right down the middle, letting the light emphasize the script marching across dry and musky pages…

“…the Master demanded such. Imagination was an affront to social order and fanciful works were a poison to be shunned…”

And then she slammed the novel shut, feeling ashamed. A gruff sound boomed out of the clapping halves, commanding the attention of the still wandering Leonardo, as she loudly cursed herself as a fool. “I can’t s-start a book halfway through. I’ve gah, uh, I’ve got to start, um, at the first page.” Blowing a self-derisive raspberry, she reverently laid the novel on it’s back and slowly pried open the cover, meeting only a blank page, which she pinched between her fingers and eased aside. Revealed where the words “ _The Quest of Jin-Nya_ — Second Edition” with Crawford’s name printed in humble letters beneath. Behind that was a copyright page crediting “Prometheus Press”, followed by a one-line note, reading “Dedicated to our nation’s Master, a man who killed billions without spilling a drop of blood.” 

She flipped through a few more pages, anticipating a foreword that would grant her insight into the mind of D.L. Crawford, but was disappointed to find no such thing. Instead there was a single blank page directly preluding a header printed in a gothic font: “Chapter 1—Serenity and Suffering”, the beginning of the story proper. 

“…a day that changed the United States forever. The status-quo was established in earnest, and the only tale to guide the lives of you and I, the American people, was to be the very one we as a nation just enjoyed: the story of America’s birth and maturity.” 

Outside the pink hues of blooming dawn staring bleeding into the clouds, magnanimously perched behind Fent’s towers. As shadows took shape along the pavement of Reverie’s Home, cicadas conceded to the whistling of morning songbirds and the stars dimmed in a sky that waxed purple. Leonardo strutted slowly, silently between the restless child and the yawning window, a ghoulishly thin silhouette trailing behind his alien frame as he extended his arms and wings as if greeting the crowning sun. Or perhaps saying farewell to it? The Vagrant wondered if, in some strange way only heaven and nature were wont to understand, Leonardo would willingly follow her back home, to the scarlet lands of Syl-No. 

“All hail the Master. Forever revered. Forever feared. All hail the United States of America.” 

The Vagrant lustfully dipped her nose into the crease of the pages, cover and cover cradled motherly in hand and hand. With the first few words of _The Quest of Jin-Nya_ fabricating new, refreshing images in her boundless imagination, her escape into Crawford’s beautiful Hell was underway. 

Elsewhere,the monotoned voice within the radio crowed endlessly…


End file.
